1951: Movies and a New Masculinity (original) (raw)
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Education Arts and Humanities in Higher Masculinity studies : The case of Brando
This reflective article interrogates the role of masculinity studies in the women's and gender studies' classroom by looking at the work of American film icon Marlon Brando. Brando and his risky masculinity in the film represents a locale of 'dangerous desires' which reveal deep conflict in student perceptions of men, women, and gender.
Dissertation: 'It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World': Hypermasculinity, Demonised Queerness and the Failure of Interpersonal Relationships in the work of Tennessee Williams, 2018
This thesis will examine representations of hypermasculinity and its effects on characters in the theatre of 20th-century American dramatist Tennessee Williams, specifically in; A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). My central thesis is that the hyper-masculine characteristics embodied by Stanley Kowalski and Mitch in Streetcar as well as Brick and Big Daddy Pollitt in Cat inhibit their capacity to maintain successful interpersonal relationships within both plays. Relationships of the platonic, romantic and familial kind will be under investigation throughout this dissertation. Williams’ work, which first came to prominence in 1944, best represents the nature of Post-War American masculinity as his male characters are oblique, unfixed and ambiguous - even sexually ambiguous in some cases. Williams’ drama also allows the insecurity of hyper-masculine characters such as Stanley Kowalski to emerge through their actions and interactions with other characters Additionally, I will prove that the restrictiveness of hyper-masculinity in these plays leads to the demonisation and exclusion of queer characters thus only rendering it possible to convey queerness through omission - particularly within the relationship between Brick and Skipper in Cat and Blanche and Stanley in Streetcar. I will also pay close attention to the setting of Williams’ plays, and the significance of alcohol in both plays. I will place the role of the Post-War period in the formation of hyper masculine ideals at the centre of my argument as, following the end of the war, hypermasculinity and conservatism re-emerged in American society, creating tension in relationships between men and women, as reflected by Williams’ plays. Knowing this, I will analyse the impact this choice of setting has on the male characters and their conduct in relationships throughout both plays. The relationships most germane to my analysis in this dissertation are those between Maggie, Brick, Skipper, and Big Daddy in Cat and the relationship between Mitch, Stanley, and the DuBois sisters in Streetcar. Overall, in writing this thesis,I will prove that the rigidity and repressive traits that constituted Post-War male consciousness create a barrier to self-expression and thus disrupt the relationships between the aforementioned characters.
Complicity Across the Atlantic: A Literary Liaison Between Two Androgynous Artists
2014
Never anxious about artistic ‘borrowing,’ Tennessee Williams reputedly considered himself heir to this perennial practice as he lavishly ‘littered’ his own ‘original’ works with overt and covert references to literary luminaries from past and present (Debusscher 1997). And yet, it is safe to say that much of his cultural renown is due to his ‘unique’ artistic sensitivity. However, with one fellow artist this barefaced borrowing takes on a reciprocal turn – nurtured by a shared fascination with the mythological figure of Orpheus (Kontaxopoulos 2001), an ambitious adaptation of Streetcar by one of them (Lieber 2005), an equally shared admiration by and fascination for the actress Tallulah Bankhead (Debusscher 1982), and finally a conspicuous copying of significant chunks from The Eagle Has Two Heads by the other (ibid.). Indeed, the artistic interactions between Tennessee Williams and the French paragon of modernism Jean Cocteau strike by their repeated returns. This essay therefore ambitions to pick up where leading Williams scholar Gilbert Debusscher’s analysis about the impact of Cocteau’s Eagle on The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore left off thirty years ago. By both retracing the intricacies of their mutual influences while assessing the stylistic and semiotic means with which these came into being, it purports to present an analogy-based reassessment of the Williams-Cocteau interchange and of the so-called ‘problem of influence’ alike. After all, as argued by Harold Bloom in his landmark study The Anxiety of Influence, claims pertaining to this notion must be embedded in analogy-based reasoning because the very integration of influences into an aesthetic sensitivity constitutes a fundamental part of the lifecycle of an artist as artist (Bloom, 1997). Accordingly, the ‘impure’ concept of influence paradoxically becomes a rare credible means of gauging the ‘original’ contributions of Williams and Cocteau as culturally androgynous artists.
Littera Aperta, 2016
Movie adaptations of dramatic works have always been very popular. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) has been adapted several times and in different ways. Feminist and gender studies have examined the important role of Otherness in the construction of female identity. Using their findings, we compare the ways in which the theme of Otherness has been employed in representing female gender identity in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and in its Iranian film adaptation, The Stranger (Bigāneh) (2014). The results of the study show that while in both works the female characters' traditional female roles have been highlighted, in the Iranian movie the main female character economically enjoys a relatively higher independence and can have a voice of her own to act against the patriarchal traditions. Besides, whereas in the source text women’s identity is solely associated with their being the Other of men, women in The Stranger stand on a par with their male companions, if not higher than them. The study also reveals that a main reason for these differences originates in the sociopolitical, cultural and historical discrepancies between the contexts in which the film and the play were created.
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE The Media are Stepping on Our Toes
cercles.com
In other words, willy-nilly, with the agreement of the author or not, “the medium is the message.” The question then is how we can make the message stronger than the medium or how can we use the medium to make the message stronger. Too often a hot medium (the cinema, music and singing) has a tendency to reduce the message from what it would be in a cool medium. I find a hot medium implies a complete projection of the audience into the medium, whereas a cool medium implies the audience keep their heads clear and sharp on their shoulders thanks to a safe distanciation.